Category Archives: soul food

{voice} in the wilderness

the-will-of-god2
“I will punish her for the days
she burned incense to the Baals; she decked herself with rings and jewelry, and went after her lovers, but me she forgot,” declares the Lord. “Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness  and speak tenderly to her. There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. There she will respond as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt.”
Hosea 2:13-15

(start)

He drew me into the heart of the wilderness just outside my aching soul with a voice so earnest and so holy and so pure with love.
It was love I needed.
It was love I was seeking all along.
Real love from the Source of all love.

Using the mortar and pestle of the Gospel,
God pounded and crushed my resistance into an ashen powder.
Then hovering over the waters of my deep
He whispered three words,

“Let there Be.”
And I am because He is….
beautiful.

His voice,
the voice of God,
was all my heart could bear for days
and weeks
and months in that wilderness until at last,
it was the only voice I could hear anywhere anymore.
It was now the only voice I wanted and could trust
and follow now with my heart and vow renewed.

Walking wounded yet restored,
the ache of wanting to know and be known,
to see and be seen,
to hear and be heard
is constant.

Sometimes I have to push past the pain of
what I know,
what I understand and remember
mixed with what I don’t know, and don’t understand
and. don’t. want. to. remember….

because THIS is my offering.
This is the holy thing God did…
is doing.

And the ache of wanting –of needing to speak because He speaks, through His Word, through His world, through my pain and joy and life….

to share what I’ve learned
with those I …
just feel,
just know
their need…
has been overwhelming.

I am undone and it can’t be undone.

(stop)

______
Oh the ache…the loneliness of the lie that I’m the only one nearly overwhelms me along the road sometimes when I wonder if “God really said…”

But I know He did.
Oh then I hear it… faint at first…that unmistakable voice I remember so well and know so intimately…
the voice of God pouring through another…a Natasha, a Duane, a Katherine, a Lani, a Diana,…a Jennifer…and so many others!
My brother’s and sisters whom I recognize instantly because they know and they speak with His voice too.

Page by page,
word by word,
breath by breath
and deed by deed…

our voices join together
across time and space
and land and country
and erupt like a chorus of hallelujahs
singing psalms over the brokenness of this world,
drawing others in from their ignorance and wilderness,
drawing and inviting them to join in the hopeful and healing journey

…to taste and see and sing with One Voice.

soul food

{Look}

eyes-to-see1I asked for it.

I sang  and prayed with all my heart and begged for it.

“Open the eyes of my heart Lord….I want to see you.”

and

“Give me your eyes for just one second….”

And you did.

You reached down inside of me in your loving, Ezekiel way.
You took my heart of stone and gave me YOUR heart of flesh.
A heart with eyes.
A heart that can see others the way you see.

And the best and most beautiful thing is that I do.
I feel with this heart and see with it into those places where you need me to touch and to love and to give and to mend
…with your power and your beauty.

But I confess…. I didn’t know it would hurt so much.
I didn’t know there would be times I’d want to look away…I’d need to….  run and hide and catch my breath for just a moment.
Times when I’d feel the crowd of hurt pressing in,
pressing hard and taking my breath away.
Sucking the life right out of me.
Like a vacuous black hole.

I see and feel.
Whether I want to look or not.

And it hurts because
I want to do more, be more, help more, hope more, love more
…mend the broken more.

I get tired…and want to look away.

In this moment you are there in still greater measure,
lifting me, carrying me and bearing me up in your mighty arms.
Whispering into this heart you gave to me…
of greater, sweeter wisdom than I’d ever know otherwise.
Whispering of courage and strength and insight I could never conjure up and must never,  ever claim for myself.
Here I can rest in knowing that it’s enough that I’m claimed and owned and carried by You.

So while there are times I must retreat and rest,  when I must be still and must drink deeply to refresh myself from your well, there is no place I would rather be than HERE; in the center of your will…seeing and loving and feeling as I imagine you do.

You chose to open the eyes of my heart, gave me yours and
I can not go back again.

I can not afford to look away…and I don’t want to.

Just show me how.

soul food

Rent and Spent

joel-rended-heart2

There’s a sweetness in my soul that’s been simmering for the past few weeks. It’s the kind of sweetness that can only come from the hand of God but it’s still been nothing short of rough.

My soul has been seared with the heat of some bitter tears and  I’ve needed more time to sort through my “stuff” so I didn’t just use this space to spew some narcissistic angst or rant to garner attention and somehow temporarily salve my shredded soul.

I don’t want to waste these precious moments on trivialities when there’s so much to be gained from patience and “pleroma”…the fullness that only God can bring about when we wait upon him.  And in this time of waiting and sorting I’m discovering the truth of C.S. Lewis’ Aslan when he told us that this “Great Lion” is not safe but He’s worth it. Oh yes, God is so worth it.

Rent…rending…tearing.

This verse from Joel has marked me deeply for I am one who’s been “rent”. My heart has been torn in two. And here’s the beautiful and most perplexing thing: I didn’t tear it. No, God did. He moved me to give it to Him and Him alone and then; He tore it. It may sound callous or cruel but really, it’s the most beautiful, loving and necessary thing He could do.

Torn in two and ripped from top to bottom like the temple curtain on the day that Jesus died. The day God, himself through Jesus’ powerful, in-the-beginning-Logos words said: “IT IS FINISHED!”, and tore that curtain of separation down, down down, forever opening the channel of communication between Himself and His children.  Unveiled and opened. Naked and unashamed again. And this is also why he rends the hearts given to Him. Because our hearts tend to be veiled as well and so God says “return to Me, give Me your heart and let me rend it for you.”

And rent I am… because I am His.

God has given me a vision. A big vision of Himself…a God-sized vision that truthfully, as one dear friend once told me, would scare me to death if I could see it all at once. And in order to receive the fullness of that vision, so much of me has to die so He can take His place. This is where the rending comes in…as he finds the bits of sin, selfishness, pride, envy and malice, manipulation and fear….he tears that bit out of me and replaces it with more of Himself.

And it hurts. The whole thing hurts. But even while it’s happening, I trust Him because He never fails me and I know, I really do know that none of the pain will be wasted even when I don’t understand why or how just yet. So I submit to His hand again and to the best of my ability, I wait.

The other day I was standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes with a particularly heavy heart and found myself singing a tune lodged somewhere in the back of my soul:

“All of You, is more than enough for all of me. For every thirst and every need. You satisfy me with your love. Till all I have in You is more than enough.”

and I stopped right there and thought hard about that. What was I singing? What was I feeling? Did I mean it? In the midst of this moment of my life..was God my “more than enough”? In the midst of my disappointment, this ache and my mess?  And I am learning the most important lesson of all: Yes, I do mean it…God really is more than enough.

So much of what has had to be dealt with in me has been “good stuff” held in bad, idolatrous places. In the life of another, these things might be just fine but God continues to sift my soul for the finer grains of gold. Because, someone wiser than me once said that sometimes we settle for many “good” things instead of the better God things. Sometimes we settle for what we think we can handle when God’s got so much more in mind.

And that’s where I am: a girl undone. Rent and spent and quite nearly at the end of myself to the place where God will do His best work in, through and in spite of me. And I’m SO thankful.

It’s gonna be beautiful and very much worth the wait. I want that. I really want that for you too.

“Even now,” declares the LORD “return to me with all your heart…”

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